Hannah Arendt’s Failures of Imagination

Hannah Arendt is back in the news, in anticipation of the release of the book “Hannah Arendt: The Last Interview and Other Conversations,” on Tuesday, and of Claude Lanzmann’s film “The Last of the Unjust,” which played at the New York Film Festival and opens on February 7th. The new book includes four interviews with Arendt. The first two, by Günter Gaus and Joachim Fest, respectively, appeared in 1964, the year after the publication of “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil” (a version of which was published, in serialized form, in this magazine), and they deal with that book in detail. The two others are by Adelbert Reif, from 1970, and the French journalist Roger Errera, from 1973. Lanzmann’s new film is centered on his 1975 interviews with Benjamin Murmelstein, who, as a rabbi in Vienna and then as the last “elder of the Jews” at Theresienstadt, the so-called model concentration camp, had the misfortune to take orders from Eichmann. The movie contradicts two of the central ideas of “Eichmann in Jerusalem”: it reveals Adolf Eichmann to have been an anti-Semitic ideologue, not a dispassionate bureaucrat, and it presents Jews who worked with the Jewish Councils under direction from Nazi authorities not as collaborators who shared guilt with the Nazis but as tragic heroes. (I’ll revisit the film at the time of its release.)

I’ve written before about “Eichmann in Jerusalem”; in that post, I suggested that Arendt’s charge that Eichmann suffered from a “lack of imagination” is actually the essential flaw of her own book. Her mechanistic view of Eichmann’s personality, as well as her abstract and unsympathetic consideration of the situation of Jews under Nazi rule, reflect her inability to consider the experiences of others from within. What’s remarkable about the new collection of interviews is that, there, too, Arendt levies criticisms of other thinkers that apply at least as well to her own work. It’s as if she spoke and wrote in the grasp of her intellectual unconscious, which drove her to reveal her own assumptions about Eichmann, Nazis, and their Jewish victims with a self-defeating probity.

In the interview with Gaus, Arendt tells the memorable story of her escape from Germany, in 1933. (She was arrested for compiling a pamphlet documenting “anti-Semitic statements made in ordinary circumstances” but was ultimately released by the unusually sympathetic official who arrested her, and immediately made her way to France.) Arendt explains that what she found most intolerable in Germany at the time wasn’t the overt hostility of anti-Semites but the compromises of “friends”—of fellow-intellectuals—with the Nazi policy of Gleichschaltung (“coördination”), the conformity of all German institutions to the Nazi party line: “Among intellectuals Gleichschaltung was the rule, so to speak,” she says. Arendt doesn’t ascribe their compromise to any personal failings, like cowardice or careerism, but, rather, to the particular flaws inherent in intellectualism:

I still think that it belongs to the essence of being an intellectual that one fabricates ideas about everything. No one ever blamed someone if he “coordinated” because he had to take care of his wife or child. The worst thing was that some people really believed in Nazism! For a short time, many for a very short time. But that means that they made up ideas about Hitler, in part terrifically interesting things! Completely fantastic and interesting and complicated things! Things far above the ordinary level! I found that grotesque. Today I would say that they were trapped by their own ideas. That is what happened. But then, at the time, I didn’t see it so clearly.

This is an astonishing passage, for several reasons. First, Arendt reveals the ground for her belief that Eichmann was no ideological Nazi but, in fact, was just a blind functionary. Not being an intellectual, he couldn’t have had “ideas” or “terrifically interesting things” to think about Hitler, and, therefore, he couldn’t have “really believed in Nazism.” I’ve long believed that her division of the world into those who “think” and those, like Eichmann, who speak in what she calls “clichés” reflects the snobbery of a proud member of the intellectual class. It’s a strange badge of intellectual honor to ascribe true belief in Nazism solely to intellectuals, and it is yet another sign that the passions and the hatreds on which the movement ran were essentially beyond Arendt’s purview. Second, her charge against the intellectual class—that they invent “completely fantastic and interesting and complicated things” and get “trapped in their own ideas”—is the perfect description of her own heavily theoretical and utterly impersonal view of Eichmann.

In the interview with Fest, Arendt summarizes the substance of “Eichmann in Jerusalem” in a few blunt sentences: “He doesn’t actually have any criminal motives …. He wanted to go along with the rest …. He was a typical functionary …. Ideology, in my view, didn’t play a very big role here.” She even explains, in detail, her choice of the word “banal” in “the banality of evil,” citing an anecdote by Ernst Jünger about a remark by a German “peasant” and says, “There’s something outrageously stupid about this story …. Eichmann was perfectly intelligent, but in this respect he was stupid. It was this stupidity that was so outrageous. And that was what I actually meant by banality. There’s nothing deep about it—nothing demonic! There’s simply the reluctance ever to imagine what the other person is experiencing, right?” This description could also apply to her own reluctance, in “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” to imagine her subjects’ experiences in terms beyond the intellectual substance of their discourse or the political implications of their actions.

There’s a word for what’s missing in “Eichmann in Jerusalem”: emotion. For instance, Arendt is reluctant to imagine Eichmann’s death-hatred of Jews, the fear and despair that Jews who were compelled to serve on Jewish Councils felt in the presence of Nazis. But there’s one place where Arendt does discuss emotion with Fest—in relation to the so-called campaign against “Eichmann in Jerusalem.” The interviewer says:

Let’s return to your book, Frau Arendt. In it, you referred to the way that the Eichmann trial laid bare the total nature of the moral collapse at the heart of Europe, among the persecutors and the persecuted alike, in every country. Does the reaction to your book—a reaction that consisted on the one hand of denying this collapse, and on the other of making a confession of total guilt—indicate precisely what you were trying to prove?

The confession in question came from Germans; the denial, mainly from Jews who were infuriated by the charges of Jewish complicity in the Holocaust. When I read Fest’s question, I was shocked by his distillation of Arendt’s book into the repellent charge of “moral collapse … among the persecutors and the persecuted alike,” and I expected that Arendt would object. But she does no such thing. Instead, she discusses her dismay at the reactions that the book elicited from Jews, and she cites the campaign against it. To what does she ascribe the campaign? On one hand, Arendt portrays herself as a sort of Socrates who was persecuted by those whose “interests” were damaged by her publication of “factual truths.” Namely, “the Jewish organizations”: “ ‘That’s it,’ they think, the anti-Semites are going to say ‘the Jews themselves are to blame.’ ” On the other hand, she acknowledges having hurt “legitimate feelings” and having “wounded some people” with her charges of Jewish collaboration. She adds that those detractors who had “legitimate interests” were upset not by the substance of the book but, rather, by her “style”—her ability to laugh and her “irony.”

It’s a self-delusion of a very high order. Even though in “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” Arendt calls Eichmann “a clown,” the book hardly resembles “The Great Dictator,” and it’s ghoulish to imagine her reading it out loud and laughing, as Kafka did with “The Trial.” Certainly, Eichmann’s stiff and euphemistic “Officialese” (“Officialese is my only language”) and his insensitive, convoluted, and sentimental stories are ridiculous and easy to mock. But her dry derision of a serious criminal isn’t what brought angry responses from Jewish readers. Rather, they arose from exactly what Fest described, placing the “the persecutors and the persecuted” (itself a damnable bit of euphemistic Officialese that means “the Nazis and the Jews”) on the same moral footing. That idea didn’t hurt anyone’s feelings or interests—it offended them morally, as it still offends.

In the last pages of the last interview with Errera, from 1973, Arendt returns to the book:

When I wrote my “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” one of my main intentions was to destroy the legend of the greatness of evil, of the demonic force, to take away from people the admiration they have for the great evildoers like Richard III or et cetera. I found in Brecht the following remark: “The great political criminals must be exposed and exposed especially to laughter. They are not great political criminals, but people who permitted great political crimes, which is something entirely different. The failure of his enterprises does not indicate that Hitler was an idiot.”

What does the sudden reversal in this idea—from laughter to Hitler’s non-idiocy—imply? Arendt quotes Brecht’s explanation: “ ‘If the ruling classes,’ says he, ‘permit a small crook to become a great crook, he is not entitled to a privileged position in our view of history.’ ” In effect, Brecht was blaming the capitalist system for Hitler; he diminishes Hitler and, for that matter, the passions of Nazism in order to derive them as a function of class relations. Arendt doesn’t rely on the same argument as Brecht, but she employs the same strategy. She reduces Eichmann to a “functionary,” and she dehumanizes the experiences of his victims by means of a different theory, one replete with “terrifically interesting things! Completely fantastic and interesting and complicated things! Things far above the ordinary level!” But the fact that these interesting things led Arendt to blame the victims along with the Nazis ought to have sufficed to discredit the theory in her eyes even as she wrote it—not through any obligatory political solidarity with “Jewish organizations” but through the ordinary exercise of imaginative sympathy. And her unintentionally revealing remarks in these interviews suggest that, somewhere deep down, she knew it.